29 December 2025

"Seed-Sourcing" is a collective open-writing practice.

These texts are process-documents - meaning they are spontaneous (written in 10 minutes or less) and utterly unedited. They are intended to be read only in the spirit of their context (i.e. - not treated as 'literature', but rather a trace of an immediate arrival in the moment, belonging solely to the shared practice).

ROUND 1

L 1 :

The dark season was never meant to be substituted.It was meant to be dark.To slow the pulse of the land and the body.To teach us how to rest, how to die.

But we string light across it.We cover the long nights in blinking reassuranceproof that we are still awake,still productive,still performing.

Christmas lights flicker like a nervous system that cannot settle.

Rhythms pulled off course.

Bodies wired for cycles, confused.

This is the weight of chronic stimulation on our ecosystem.

I wonder what this season would look like,what this culture would look like,if we didn’t cover it entirely in Christmas lights.If we’d let the dark brace us instead of fearing it.

If there were only the light of fire.The light of dawn and day.

They are restorative enough.

Winter is not to be skipped.It pulls life inward so that something essential can be restored.

“Partnering is a vow to shape life alongside one another.” ( Eli wrote this line and I love it )

What would it meanto shape life alongside winter?Not as something to endure or decorate over,but as a collaborator in our becoming.

Letting the quiet be enough.Trusting that not everything needs illumination to be alive.

That some things need darknessto remember who they are

GOSHA

I am c-c-constantly worried about something that is yet to happen. Maybe this has something to do with me growing up during the dissolution of the Soviet empire, but the anticipation of what’s coming always makes me feel wide awake, up and running.

At some point, when I was about 3 years old, my mother lost all her savings, as everyone else in the country that ceased to exist due to incompetence of its rulers. I guess, ever since then, the future and its variations became a very important topic for me and, later, even a professional field.

This isn’t fear; I would call it an area of special interest for me. I’m future-curious, future-sensitive, future-aroused.

R:

The subtle joints of the skeleton of spirit

how one chooses to go from one word to the next…

While entering the total, complete death of the empty space between words...

What voice does one listen so as to come back into the life of the next word?

What calling do I follow?

What logical fabric determines the choice of my next word?

All that I can love right now, all that I pay attention to… is the logical fabric that

gives birth to me into the life of the next word.

What body of attention shapes my will?

What is the logic of the subtle, immediate, pre-temporal choice in that space of death between words?

That is the very flesh of love. Its most exact taste.

E:

There is a bell in the cupola outside my window - dampened to an hourly barely-there.

It is less convincing than the pigeon perched upon it. Or the flashing light of the harbor crane behind - the load-bearing arm, docking all the coming and going goods. It is just as elegant as the belltower and its bird. 

Oh, how I love the no-where room. 

The anonymity of white sheets and so easily cleaned surfaces. 

The sound of only strangers, to whom I will never account my choices. 

I am deep in the cover of personless - the noone box. And it is pure ease.

They are stirring their coffee. They are dropping their forks. They are requesting more strawberry jam. (What a thing - berries at the end of December.)

I know what I will do with the desert and flood. 

I will plant in it. 

What else could be called from the union of earth and water? -

the kingdom will have fruit to eat and herbs to steep and grains to flour and knead. 

There will be bread. 

There will be the bread of today. And the twinkling lights. And the grey-paper ceiling of the lowland sky. 

And arms that know me, wrapped around. And the welcoming of all our faces. 

Artemis and the artisan. 

The prince and the mother.

(we have not spoken of the archetypes. I wonder who amongst the fellows might be keen.)

How I love the questions of this time of year. The looking-forward. The dough in the oven. 

I miss the hourly monastic metal: the empty head nodding, nudging for an answer - 

who are you for? who are you now? and what do you love? 

what do you love? 

and now? 

and now what do you love?

The bell. The bell is not a clock. 

In this new year, I will set a bell. A dampened, hourly bell. To toll me back to life as bells are built to do. 

Then I can play with my faces 

and know that each is a mask my soul wears - but nevertheless true. Never less true

than the spirit pigeon perched upon my head.

J:Non linear timelines are living through me right now, later, before, afterwards for aeons. 

Aeons ago, aeons ahead,  incomprehensible, at the birthing place of consciousness.

At the moment of a physical death.

The states between physical reality and time jumping through sound memories, vibrational frequencies. 

Sound is/was the sense that woke a sense of this parallel existence.

How do you know what reality to follow? How do you know which is the timeline that is serving this current life incarnation? Is it all in reality separate to begin with?

Is it solely the experience the brain, the body, the psyche generates?

When you don't go searching, seeking, interrogating the past it seems to rise without warning.

It finds you to remind you of what you can't remember. 

You can't remember what you don't remember. obviously.

We were talking about memories yesterday. 

The subconscious doesn't seem to play by the same rules as this wake.

Wakefulness, awake. 

Something rather profound, has happened, is happening, will continue to happen.

D:

There's this creature or these creatures that come to terrorize the homestead in the middle of the night. They will not let the inhabitants sleep. Their sounds and smells arise an anxiety to the inhabitants until they are so worked up that when the creatures finally depart at the witching hour, the inhabitants are so excited and exhausted into a frenzy, even in the new found quiet, the inhabitants cannot find peace for hours more still.

Most of the creatures mean no ill. They are just following their instincts and learned patterns. It is a common ritual to eat in certain ways, sleep in certain ways, and every night between 23h00 and 4h00 to play the game of terror to the inhabitants of the nearby stone structure. 

It's a childlike glee of obnoxious naughty delight these creatures feel.

Blissfully naive devils. 

Obtuse.

Aloof

Accidentally Cruel.

ROUND 2

L 2 :

Data collected from a nervous system that lived in the year 2025:

I plug in the lightsfor safekeeping.

I unplug from my body,close my inner eye.

I eat when I’m not hungryand stay awake when I’m tired.

I stay busy enoughbuy too much,exaggerate…not to feel the quiet.

I mistake overwhelmfor aliveness.

I substitute light for warmth,noise for rest,motion for meaning.

Substitute.Substitute.

Gosha

Ever since I was a kid I was a keen reader and listener. I wanted to absorb all the sounds, smells, images, words, symbols, dreaming about something that I guess is called transcendence. At some point, when I was working as the news anchor at the local TV network in my town, I began to question myself, if I’m going to spend the rest of my life correcting other people’s words so their stories can be weaved into a comprehensible daily narrative - or do I want to try to become someone who makes statements about what’s going to happen? And what voice would I choose to develop out of many inside of me, if I’m to become someone who speaks?

The infant desire to be heard and seen became a subject of critical examination and a field of a collective passion. Now I’m shifting my focus towards the linguistic approach. I want to sneak into the core of predictive algorithms, the performative nature of our spoken words - just to patiently listen to our deep-covered prayers for tomorrow. And to join the cry with my own song, when the time is right.

R:

The space of all possible life configurations… opens its petals like a lotus.

Many desired lifetimes can happen with the subtle, exact motion of a finger.

I stand by the tomb of Vincent. There is no time for lazy feelings.

We just roam the higher and the lower fields… with bodies of trees.

What?

Me and Vincent, we take black, lightning bodies and roam through fields… going through all weathers, all ages of history… perfect memory and perfect capacity to see all of the versions of the fields… in all historical processions…

Me and Vincent, we know how to engage multi-dimensional contortions…

What?

I take the body of the field in a rainy winter day…

He takes the body of the field in a summer night. Same field.

We produce the great adventure of their meeting, their love story… and how they created eventually two distinct civilizations… entering war… clashing… etc… etc…

Me and Vincent.

We test bodies of lightning trees, their contorted muscles, their petrified thoughts.

The perfumes of a summer night.

The perfumes of the frozen mud.

The day he shot himself in the chest.

The day we had a discussion while walking on the vast planes on the surface of the bullet… getting closer to his chest. What a joy. Sacrifice is.

E:

There are temples peopling my body. 

Cells. 

Sprouted grass. 

Fur rooted in the pores of the hides of countless animals. 

Milk in teets, awaiting the morning pumping drum. 

A treasure from an early birthday : the smacking lips of a calf on the nipple of a bottle in my hands.

Thank God for prepositions. 

They make place possible. 

I have a dream of lying on a plush rug with a slew of baby mammals tumbling all over me. 

I could be blindfolded. (all the better to feel)

I could be tied. (all the better to survive such inexplicable tickle)

How much joy can one body take?

And what if these darling whiskered and squirming pearls were 

futures

or lovers

or stories

or homes?

Oh, the smell of the breath of the newly born!

We return to the temple-guild. 

The house of the temple-makers. (that’s us!)

It is little known, but temples are merely homes for love,

and must be kept alive.

This is why they have altars - the digestive system of the sacred. - (nevermind the microbiome of hope)

This is why they have colorful glass - the synapses of light. (and the leaden scaffold of nerves between them)

This is why they have candles - the lungs of longing. (the invisible rising of wax is the sipping esophagus)

And what of the stone skin? And what of immunity? And what of the skeletal shape? The bones.

The bones. The bones. Are the ones, like us, that live inside and move the building to its birthright.

I will wriggle like a puppy searching for milk. 

That is the temple of today. 

J: 

To be able to live without resistance to what is unfolding.

To cease control and attachment.

Does this mean that I will truly be living though?

Unattached, unaffected, distracted by the stimulation of the external world.

These twinkling lights this time of the year in the north are finally sinking into my system.

The festival of lights.

The second year here, where I live. Perhaps my system can begin to comprehend now that I have a reference point. 

The days are long and hot back in the southern hemisphere during this time of the year. 

Its colloquial term is the silly season.

I think I have divulged.

This is topical.

D:

The inhabitants cannot blame the creatures. In their exhaustion they feel immense amounts of anger. The lack of sleep is driving the inhabitants to go a bit insane. 

But while their minds slip away into a lost void, they also envy the creatures.

The inhabitants yearn for the peace of mind and equilibrium that the creatures feel.

Oh to be obnoxious and playful.

After several months, the inhabitants will lose all sense of reality.

Faced with a dimented unknown state of mind they will eventually become feral.

There will be a glimmer of hope still left in the inhabitants that they too could retreat to the woods.

To become like the creatures, in a happy-go-luck state of playful abandon no matter which neighbors they disrupt. 

There is this glimmer that there might be a glint of a creeping thin hint of a possibility of hope in this potential to become as obnoxious themselves.

But alas, it will be fleeting. 

The inhabitants' anger will distort them into nasty blobs of anxiety and teeth.  Vicious viscous monsters. 

Forever hunting.

Never never sleeping.

In turmoil for an eternity

Hell.

While likely a foregone conclusion, this future is not written.

And one of the inhabitants is grasping desperately for the hope of their own blissful equilibrium.

That glint in a light in the distance. 

A promise of calm

A choice

ROUND 3

R:

As Vincent often said: The stone shall die, but the word shall remain.

Now this must be patent nonsense.

How can it be?

Words are some minor events in comparison to the scale of geological time.

These are the words of a mad person.

The mad, the lovers, the children… and the artists…

Have something in common.

They can look at a stone and say: ‘I love you, mother!’

They can touch the stone, and say: ‘Can you feel my breath?’

They can sleep on a stone and spread roots of purified thought motions through the mineral flesh…

A child will touch a tree bark and say:

‘My dragon friend, how beautiful you are!’

I dare you, now.

Go search for that place where you might be able to contradict that!

Really.

Summon all the hate you can…Gather in you all the darkest capacities… Make an army with all the parents that ever traumatized their children… in the true desire to fully destroy, destabilize, erase, explode such a pure experience! 

I shall observe it all like an eager apprentice.

E:

Paws. and hooves. and hands.

I will touch the surfaces I cross without knowing them. Without pretending that I know them. Ha!

I have a few hidden lives. 

Some have been happening a long while now. 

One of the secret selves includes :

collecting the dirt and dust upon which daily miracles happen. 

The kindness of a stranger. 

The heartbreak of loss. 

The surprise of a stumble.

The promise of relief. 

The grace of beginning.

… I walk around with Qtips and little plastic baggies in my purse. 

I swab the street, the sidewalk, the grocery store floor, the beach, the corridor, the forest path, the cobblestones, the meadow… and note whatever it is that’s happened there.

Because matter is matter.

And it's listening - those little particle-archives, the librarians of heaven.

I will collect a thousand. 

I am not so far from that  - this has been going on for a while. 

(we all have our odd and private fascinations, do we not?

let us not pretend to know each other.

let us forever frolic and loop in the circuit of discovery.)

So how will I make the puppy-breath banquet real? How will I make it happen?

I will divulge. 

But only when I’m ready. 

(One can scare away a sneeze, after all.)

And what will become of the index of dirt?

I am still deciding. 

I cannot describe the excitement of preparing a present that takes months to make possible. 

Wait. I don’t have to. You already know. (this is the clearest definition of an artist - is it not?)

Gosha

If I am to think about the prayer of my own, I’d pick a vowel to start my prayer with. I would choose O, as it feels the most natural to begin with. Out of that, I’m going to think about how long my prayer will take, to make sure I’m not taking other people’s time, as there are many other prayers in line. Then I’d think about what I would ask for in my prayer, to co-measure its length and its weight.

After these calculations, I’d start to add other sounds to my future prayer. I’d continue with an M as the closing gesture for the first syllable. It’s gonna take a while for me to open my mouth, lick my lips that suddenly became dry, pronounce an elongated O and close it with an M. Then, I’m ready to open up. I want a garden of my own that was taken away from me awhile ago. Maybe not the exact same one, but a garden. It can be a kitchen, an electronic repair workshop, a library, a small flowerbed in the backyard even. Something to be around of, to take care of, to spend time with - something that will help to grow my life back out of the shell it’s being in for years now.

I know for sure this exactly what my next year will be like.

J:How do I make it happen?

What is meant to happen is already happening, has already happened.

One version of myself would give myself a stern talking to, pressure myself into following the voice of the ego, the voice that needs recognition for the blood sweet and tears poured into achieving, being productive, producing.

Another version of myself would listen quietly and attentively to the divine timing of the unfolding of what is already happening, to float into the slip stream of a mother dolphin.

Once upon a time I went swimming with dolphins in Mozambique.

I learned that baby dolphins (possibly other swimming mammals) have this instinct to swim very close to their mothers, not because they don't know how to swim, not because they have fear, but because the motion of swimming the the mother creates a slip stream, a wake which helps the baby keep up with the pod and conserve energy.

There is a name for this; it's called the echelon position.

I just read this is used in the military where, a formation of troops, ships, aircraft, or vehicles in parallel rows with the end of each row projecting further than the one in front.

My train of thought was leading me to highlighting the beauty, profundity and power of natural systems that we, as mammals, can learn from. 

Again circling back to non resistance, ego, blood, sweat and tears. 

What a contradiction we can be as a species, human.

D:

As much as this one inhabitant chooses and tries and tries to adapt and augment the circumstances, all attempts are hopeless.

At first there were tools of observation: sensors, cameras, radar

Then there were structures: fences, walls, a moat.

After there were adjustments of behaviour

Superstitions and invented rituals as a last resort.

This one inhabitant will not give up on hope.

A dream to sleep.

A dream to sleep

A dream to sleep

Despite the efforts to even try to become nocturnal, to resist resisting, nothing works.

The creatures and their nocturnal habits are not kept at bay and the inhabitants undoubtedly morph and mutate. Giving up on their minimal hope left.

A nightmare of wake

The inhabitants will eventually leave the structure and slide their new goopy and toothed bodies hatefully about the environs, spreading their angst until more and more neighboring inhabitants lose their sleep and also join the growing herd of sleepless mindless hell.

Until thousands of years from now, the one inhabitant who had held onto the light of possibility the longest encounters a creature in the light under the moon.

At first the former inhabitant chased the creature. 

After hours, this night, that chase becomes a dance

And that former inhabitant has a moment of play. 

A sense of bliss

A glimmer in this blob reignites.

And dawn begins to break.